Or build a micropayment system that takes off, so we can collectively pay for good reporting....

It would be interesting if once a certain revenue threshold was met the paywall would be removed.

He did ask for one that takes off.

And/or use tax money to pay for good reporting, as has been standard practice in many jurisdictions for a long time.

If you live in the US then you may not be aware but your tax money does pay for a news service: http://www.voanews.com

Isn't that more propaganda meant for export?

The well regarded BBC World Service falls in the same category.

I wonder how well this would work for WSJ type stories. Some of their stories are generic newswires, but the juicy stuff is from knowing insiders and building relationships over the years. A generic reporting service will tell you that "Company A unveiled product B" but will unlikely report that "Company A gave up a bunch of liquidation preferences to get a $1 bln valuation".

e.g. China, Russia, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, etc.

The UK (BBC), Australia (ABC), New Zealand (Radio New Zealand)

Sweden (SVT, SR), Norway (NRK)..

Yes! Is anyone working on it? Single click microdonations from a dedicated bitcoin wallet? I am not a bitcoin nut but this sounds like the perfect application for it.

Yes - I did: https://www.coinbee.io - lobby them to implement the API!

Oh, you mean blendle.com

So how does it work?

To my knowledge: Google requires that you can't serve different content to its bots than a user can reach from the search results. So the link from a Google search changes the Referrer to Google (since it's a redirect) and WSJ gives you the content.